Nervous Conditions
by Fialleril
Summary: Clone Wars ficlets. The war shapes them all, in different ways. New: Barriss Offee is a rebel.
1. Ahsoka Tano

**Disclaimer: **I don't own Star Wars or The Clone Wars.  
**Series Note: **This is the first in what will be a series of drabbles focusing on different characters and their reactions to war. They'll probably mostly be Clone Wars related, though I have a couple that are ROTS-flavored.

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**Ahsoka Tano**

She's found that the war really isn't so bad, if she just thinks about it right. The masters always say that focus determines reality, and that's more true here than ever.

She grew up in the Temple practicing her lightsaber exercises against the training droids, dodge and lunge and deflect, and these battle droids are not really any different. They are larger, true, and vaguely humanoid-shaped, but they're still just droids. She knows how to deal with droids.

She likes the metallic grinding sound they make when her lightsaber slices through them. She likes the way they fall in rings around her feet, like an exercise well-done. She likes to imagine that Master Yoda would praise her technique if he could see her now. Sometimes Master Anakin does praise her, and those are her favorite moments. Not just because she wants to make him proud, although he is her master and she does. But when he praises her it's just like being back in the Temple, and this war is just an exercise, and that means she's in control.

Sometimes the droids make little noises of surprise when she slices through them. They sound almost like people, and she hates that fact, so she stares long and hard at their motionless faces.

They're just training droids, and she's a padawan learner and she's here to _learn_, and everything is just like it's always been.


	2. Shiv

**Disclaimer: **I don't own Star Wars or The Clone Wars.  
**Spoilers:** For the comic Cold Snap. In fact, you probably need to read that to understand this fic. And I highly recommend it. (You can find it at http: // starwars . com / clonewars / comic / (remove the spaces). Go to the table of contents page and click the Cold Snap link.)

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**Shiv**

For the first few days after he hears the news, Shiv doesn't know what to do. There are things gnawing at him, pricking at his skin and whispering in his mind, but he can't let them out, because Flanker is dead. (_Dead, dead, dead, _his mind repeats, and he wonders why it sounds like _free_.)

He thinks about writing to someone else—Trig maybe?—but he's never written to anyone but Flanker.

On the fifth day they get caught in a firefight and Shiv wastes three whole seconds before he remembers to fire back. It's then that he knows he has to do something.

Back at HQ that night, he sits down apart from his squad mates and takes out his datapad. Flanker is still dead (and the word still sounds like free), but Shiv thinks he might get the message anyway.

He sits back and begins to type.

_Flanker,_

_You won't believe the rookie mistake I made today…_


	3. Anakin Skywalker

**Disclaimer: **I don't own Star Wars or The Clone Wars.  
**Note: **This fic originated as a way of trying to tie the fairly mellow Clone Wars Anakin together with his more traumatized ROTS incarnation.

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**Anakin Skywalker**

He hates it when they're given leave. It's never long enough to go home (never long enough to see Padmé and _forget_). It's only just long enough to spend a few days _waiting_.

He usually tries to think of some training exercise for Ahsoka, but she's just as restless as he is, and she makes clumsy mistakes he knows she would never make on the field. It doesn't help that he does, too, and so it usually ends with him sending her off to meditate and hating himself for it. How many times did Master Obi-Wan do that to him? And now he finds himself wondering if it was ever because Master Obi-Wan couldn't stop his hand from shaking, and maybe he just didn't want his padawan to see.

He visits the medbay. They have calming agents that make the shaking stop, and he's intensely glad that the bay is only staffed with droids. The droids won't talk.

He goes back to find Ahsoka, and he can't even bring himself to be disappointed that she's not meditating. He wonders briefly if he should get her some of the calming agents, too, but no. She's not like him. She has a temper sometimes, but still she's a proper Jedi. She's not threatening to break apart at any moment.

And so he's glad when the call comes in. Master Rancisis needs assistance and their leave's been cut short. He's on the bridge immediately, issuing orders and taking reports and considering his strategy, and when Ahsoka joins him she only looks a little disappointed at losing a day of leave. He just hopes the relief isn't obvious on his face.

The calming agents are starting to wear off now, but that doesn't matter, because he has something to _do _again. He watches his men set the coordinates and the lines of hyperspace appear, and he thinks that the battle can't come soon enough.


	4. Chopper

**Disclaimer: **I don't own Star Wars or The Clone Wars.  
**Spoilers:** For Episode 16 "The Hidden Enemy"

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**Chopper**

His squad mates know about the necklace now, so Chopper doesn't bother to hide it anymore. Sometimes he even wears the thing around his throat, and he doesn't care who sees it.

He keeps making them, too. Sometimes he uses fingers, sometimes the triggers from droid blasters. When the squad takes the field, he brings some of the necklaces with him, and he makes sure the clankers see them. He wants the severed fingers of their comrades to be the last thing those bastards ever see.

Chopper knows the Jedi rationalize their part in the war by saying that the droids aren't really alive, and so they're not killing anyone. He thinks it's a useless rationalization, though, and he doesn't entirely understand it. They're at war, and war means killing. He doesn't see the point in denying that.

And he knows that the droids are just as alive as he and his brothers. That's why he takes the fingers. Because they're just like him.


	5. Slick

**Disclaimer: **I don't own Star Wars or The Clone Wars.  
**Spoilers:** For Episode 16 "The Hidden Enemy"

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**Slick**

He's sitting in a prison cell, hands cuffed and waiting for his trial and probably execution (he has no illusions about wartime justice), when he realizes that he is freer than he's ever been in his life.

He's gone beyond them all—the Jedi, the Separatists, even the Republic itself. He's taken out their weapons, struck a decisive blow, but even if it comes to nothing it won't matter. He's won anyway.

They can lock him away, they can even execute him, but they can't make him obey. He's broken their rules, disobeyed their orders, defied his creators and their programming, and nothing can take that away from him.

His brothers come with food and questions, and when they're actually willing to listen (which is sadly rare, but he understands), he tries to tell them why.

Once Rex asks him mockingly if it was worth it. He's expecting anger or defiance, and Slick can see that his calmness unnerves his former commander, just a little.

But it was. Even if they kill him it was worth it.

He knows now that he is free. They can never make him obey.


	6. Ahsoka Tano II

**Disclaimer: **I don't own Star Wars or The Clone Wars.  
**Spoilers:** For Episode 9 "Cloak of Darkness"

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**Ahsoka Tano**

_I wasn't really going to hurt him_, she thinks to herself, and that's what she tells Master Luminara, too. _I just wanted him to think I was. So he would talk._

And it's true, or at least it's true enough. Gunray had information and they needed it. They didn't get it, though. He's gone now, and they may never have another chance so good. A part of her that she's not even ready to acknowledge thinks that maybe if Master Luminara hadn't stopped her, he would have talked.

She could have saved lives. That's the most important thing, isn't it? But Master Luminara is a Jedi Master, so of course she's right. Ahsoka reminds herself of that, reminds herself why Master Luminara said it was wrong.

And she's grateful to Master Luminara, if not for stopping her then at least for not telling Master Anakin about what she did. Ahsoka doesn't need another lecture.

But she thinks about it, sitting alone in her quarters as the ship moves through hyperspace. She thinks about the war, and the pleasant sounds the droids make when her lightsaber slices through them, and the games she used to play with the other younglings back at the Temple.

And she can admit it to herself. She wanted to hurt him.


	7. Jester

**Disclaimer: **I don't own Star Wars or The Clone Wars.  
**Spoilers:** For Episode 16 "The Hidden Enemy"  
**Note: **Since this episode was already so heavy on the Vietnam allusions, I decided to take it one step further. Loosely inspired by Tim O'Brien's _The Things They Carried_.

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**Jester**

On the second day of the battle, Jester loses his weapon.

The fighting is thick and Chopper's just gone down with a leg wound beside him and there's no time, so he grabs the first weapon to hand. It's a fallen droid blaster, and in addition to being poorly shaped, it's _dirty_. But he makes do because it's all he has, and if he can just push those clankers back again, maybe he can find his own weapon.

But when the battle's over and he's counting their victory in the bodies of his brothers, he still can't find his weapon. In the end he has to take a blaster from one of his fallen brothers, because he can't very well go back to base unarmed. But it isn't the same. It's not a droid blaster, but it's still not _clean_.

So he takes the weapon back to base, and he spends all night trying to clean it, but he can't get the shine up. It's not _his _blaster.

Some of his brothers give him almost pitying looks, but he ignores them. He knows that none of them bother to clean their weapons properly.

At 0300 Chopper comes by with another necklace of clanker fingers, and his look isn't pitying. He just nods at Jester and goes on. Chopper understands needful things.

At 0430 Jester throws away the useless cleaning rag, takes up the blaster, sights on the big toe of his left foot, and squeezes the trigger.

He knows it'll only mean a month in medbay. He knows there is no real way out. But at least the medbay is clean.


	8. Anakin Skywalker and Ahsoka Tano

**Disclaimer: **I don't own Star Wars or The Clone Wars.  
**Spoilers:** For Episode 19 "Storm Over Ryloth"  
**Note: **Throughout this episode I kept thinking of this statement by a former Burundi military commander: "Sensible commanders always grab whatever weapons are easiest at hand, and no weapon is easier to get or control than children."

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**Anakin Skywalker and Ahsoka Tano**

He never tells Ahsoka that it's not his idea to give her command of the squadron. He never tells her that he doesn't even like the idea, because he knows she wouldn't really understand why. He knows his padawan (in so many ways she's just like him) and he knows that she would just take his reluctance for a lack of confidence in her abilities. It's what he would have thought—what he _did _think—when Master Obi-Wan refused to give him certain missions.

And besides, he has his orders. The little voice in the back of his mind that sounds strangely like his mother reminds him that orders have never stopped him before, but he shoves the voice away. Maybe he could disobey his orders, but Ahsoka is still there, fighting this war alongside him, and someday…

He knows he can't save her. He can save her life, yes, and he has plenty of times already. But he can't really save _her_.

So he tells her she has command this time and he sends her out, and when she comes back with the shreds of her well-ignored orders and the stragglers of her demolished squad, he tells her that's what it means to lead in a war.

And he lets her sulk, but not for long. He knows what he has to do now. What was it Kitster used to say? _When you're thrown you have to get back on the eopie right away, or you never will._

He doesn't give her time to think about it. By the time she's done sulking he's got it all planned out, and he talks over and around her with the practiced ease of command that leaves her gaping in astonishment as he disappears up the shuttle's ramp. Out of the corner of his eye he watches the clone troops circle around her, awaiting their orders, and for just a moment the voice that sounds like his mother threatens to come back. It says that sometimes, _never _is the best thing.

But it's always like this. He knows that. And he really should have learned by now that things won't change.

It's always like this. There was a little boy named Ani who started racing pods when he was five, even though his mother always cried. And another boy named Kitster who rode in the eopie races and who'd already had eleven broken bones by the time he turned eight, but he kept getting back on, because it wasn't his choice. And there was little Amee with her nighttime visitors, the ones she never talked about, but they all knew. And a fourteen year old girl from a civilized world who'd led a battle to retake her planet before she'd even completed her studies in mathematics.

He tells himself this as he watches their strategy play out flawlessly, watches another fourteen year old girl lead a charge and find an identity and lose that last little bit of herself that was only a child.

It's what he's supposed to do, after all. He's her master, and he's teaching her to be a Jedi. And as he watches the squadron swing around in a perfect arc, the blockade devastated and their role fulfilled, he is proud of her. He is proud of what he's made her.

And he ignores the voice that sounds like his mother. He knows you can never look back.


	9. Anakin Skywalker II

**Disclaimer: **I don't own Star Wars.  
**Spoilers:** None.  
**Note: **This one actually has a much stronger ROTS feel to it, and isn't directly connected to the Clone Wars show, but it is about Anakin's war experiences, and it seemed to fit better within this series than as a stand alone fic.

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**Anakin Skywalker  
**

Padmé thinks he doesn't trust her, but that's not true.

She's always asking him questions about the war. She wants to know about his missions, the places he's been and the action he's seen, his thoughts, his feelings. She asks him specific questions and vague, and at first he tries to answer them, but he always stumbles and breaks against the wall of his words. There's an anger there that he doesn't entirely understand, and definitely doesn't want her to see.

And so it always ends with him kissing her, hard and deep, because that's something he can do. She always lets him, but when it's over she gets that sad faraway look in her eyes. "I wish you would trust me," she says. "Like you used to."

He always tells her the same thing. He _does _trust her, and nothing has changed (but everything has, hasn't it?), and he can see that she doesn't entirely believe him.

But what he knows, now, is sulfur-stink and blaster shot and bombs slicing through air with a whistle and fast-raining fire and little dead girls with missing feet, and those are realities, but they aren't _words_. There are no words anymore.

He thinks that language is just something people invent to keep reality at a distance, and he can't _tell _her, because the words are all meaningless.

And in the end it's really very simple. He loves her, but she wasn't there.


	10. Barriss Offee

**Disclaimer: **I don't own Star Wars.  
**Spoilers:** For Episode 206, "Weapons Factory."  
**Note: **I've noticed that, across universes, my Barriss tends to be a secret rebel at heart. How that's true is different in different universes, but it's always present somehow. It was interesting to see that trait reflected in her character in this episode.

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**Barriss Offee**

She's been training for this her whole life.

This moment, this clash of cannons and breathtaking tumble of rock, is the ideal. It's the ultimate gift of self, the perfection of service that a Jedi is sworn to.

She looks at Ahsoka as the world plummets down around them, catches the note of fear behind the determination in the other padawan's eyes, and tells herself that she doesn't feel the same. There is no fear. There is no death. There is only the Force.

And she is ready for this. She's been ready for a long time. It's the mark of a Jedi, she knows, to make the sacrifice, to give her own life for the greater cause. To want anything different, anything _more_, would be rebellion.

She feels her master's acceptance on the other end of their bond, and even as Ahsoka fiddles with the com, she tells herself it doesn't matter. This is what she was trained for.

She thinks of all the lives she's saved by destroying the factory. She tries to concentrate on the acceptance she feels from her master. Ahsoka's hand grasps hers and they wait in the dark. (It would be rebellion…)

(She doesn't want to die.)


End file.
